phillyeducation

[This year marked the first graduating class of our second campus – SLA@Beeber. I was honored and thrilled to be asked to be the keynote speaker. It’s been such an incredible experience to watch this group of students and families and educators build this school into something wonderful, and I was so excited to share the day with them. — Chris]

I cannot begin to tell you how much it means to me to be standing in front of you today. What you all have done – what you all have accomplished these past four years – will stand as a tribute to your willingness to build, to take risks, to go on a journey together – for years and years to come. Every student who follows you through the halls of your school will feel the impact of all you have done and all you have built. On behalf of all of them – I thank you. What you have accomplished is profound.

And you did not do this alone. You did this with a dedicated, passionate and caring group of educators who walked this walk with you, so please, take a moment and applaud for the incredible principal, teachers and staff of the Science Leadership Academy @ Beeber who have walked this walk with you.

And still – there were more. There were the people who stood with you, stood behind you. Cheered for you. Urged you on. Pushed you. And probably wanted to clobber you at various points of time. And many of them are here with you today. So please, graduates, take a moment to applaud and thank your families, your parents, your friends who have helped to get you to this moment of celebration today.

And now – what I want to talk to you about this afternoon is what all this means for the rest of your life. You are founders. You are builders. You are makers. And that matters. We live in a world and in a time where far too many people would rather tear down than build up. It’s easier. You know – you lived – the fact that there’s nothing perfect. You know better how whatever we build together has flaws. And so, know that those who would settle for tearing down, rather than building up, would miss the whole point.

What we build may not be perfect – but it can be beautiful.

And that’s what you did. You built something beautiful. Take a moment now… think of the experience you had together. Think about the incredible artifacts of your learning that have you created. Think of the meaning you have made in the classes and halls of the building.

What you did was beautiful.

And not just the outcomes – the process matters too – a lot, actually. It’s called “the beautiful struggle” for a reason. The hours you spent on benchmark projects – the moments of frustration – the mistakes you — and we — made along the way. All of that matters. All of that is part of the beautiful thing you created. Because the struggle informs both the thing we create and the people we become.

After all – If it were easy, everyone would do it.

And so, for the rest of your life, you know something that many others do not.

You can do it. You can build. You can make. You can create.

Whatever the challenge you face next, you know what you have already done. Whenever you are faced with the moment where the odds seem insurmountable – think of that moment back in September of 2013 when you walked into a school that had never existed before and remember that you did this. And know that you can thrive.

But it’s not just about overcoming the odds on a personal level. Your charge – your mission – as you leave high school is much greater than that. You are builders – makers. And builders make the world a better place through what they create – even when it is hard. Even when it seems impossible. Even when you aren’t even sure where to start.

Think about it – what would have happened if Mr. Johnson had never taken the leap of faith that we could start a new school? There was every reason to not do it. The School District of Philadelphia isn’t exactly the easiest place to start schools, after all. But he was willing to take a risk. He was willing to sign up for what has been an incredible – and incredibly hard – four years. And know that for all of the confidence he has had in all of you — and all of the confidence he has had in all that you have built together — that there were incredibly hard moments where we both have had to wonder if we could make it all work. But makers make, and builders build. And so Mr. Johnson has always pushed forward and pushed through and worked with all of you to create something special that will matter for generations of students to come.

And now it’s your turn.

You’re not done building. You’re not done making. You’re not done creating. You are just getting started.

Take the values and skills and care that you have learned over the past four years and build those values into everything you do next.

Build things that make others wonder and question and seek. To do that is to honor the spirit of inquiry that we live every at the SLAs.

Write the stories that make people see the world through new eyes.

Build the structures that challenge the way we interact with the world.

Create the communities where people understand what it means to truly care for one another.

In short – create the things that help us to heal, to grow, to learn. Do this in whatever communities you inhabit next. Do this because the world can’t wait for someone else to do it. Do it because you know you can. Do this because you know on a personal level how powerful it is to create something new that is a force for good in the world.

Do it because that’s what it means to pay it forward.

Do it because we need you to.

That’s what it means to be a founder. A builder. A maker.

And know that it won’t be easy. Know that there will be those who will try to tear you down. Know that there will be those who will tell you it can’t be done. Know that there will be those who will tell you it’s not worth the effort.

And, then, think of your school. Think of today. Think of all you have already built. And know that they are all wrong.

And then create it anyway. Because you can.

I stand here tonight and I look at you all, and I know that you are more than capable to meet the challenges ahead. You have all already accomplished so much, and you have only begun to scratch the surface of what you can do. And with that, I want to thank you all for building a school – for creating something that did not exist before you came – for making something that matters. And with that, congratulations to the inaugural class of the Science Leadership Academy @ Beeber – the class of 2017. I know I speak for all of your teachers, for all of your families, and for Mr. Johnson when I say, we all cannot wait to see what you do next. Congratulations!

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I know this post is not exactly espousing a radical notion, but it’s still worth putting words to the page.

Theo loves to draw. He’s got an amazing imagination that translates to the page in ways that astound his mom and me. And our house is rapidly becoming the Theo Gallery.

And we live four blocks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

As a dad, I’m incredibly fortunate to have the financial means to afford a family members to the museum so I can expose Theo to the world of art inside the museum’s walls.

But not every family can afford membership to their local art museum, and even fewer families live within walking distance of a world-class museum. But every child can be exposed to the world of art – both creating and appreciating it – through school. And every child should be.

And yet, with all of the cuts to education and all of the time and energy expended on preparing for high-stakes tests, art education has been cut in many districts and many schools – and disproportionately in our neediest schools where parents may not have the money to afford a family membership. That’s criminal.

I was raised in a house with tons of artwork because of my mom’s love of art. My mom first fell in love with Leger on a school trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art when she was in 6th grade. She grew up in Camden, NJ which wasn’t a well-funded district even then, but they had art education. No one ever took her out of art class to make sure she could pass some test. Presumably, no one ever told her teachers that field trips to a Philadelphia museum took the student away from “time on task.”

I want every child to have the opportunity to have a rich art education. As Gary Stager has said often, “We are the richest country in the world, our schools should be able to afford a cello and a computer.” I want kids to go to museums, I want them to sculpt and draw. I want them to listen to jazz and classical and play instruments and sing. Here in Philadelphia, private organizations are trying to fill the gap. The Philly Stamp Pass program does an excellent job of giving kids access to museums and Stanford Thompson and the folks at Play On, Philly are doing amazing work with music education in Philadelphia.

But we should never have to rely on private philanthropy to fund what should be publicly funded in our schools.

The exhibit Theo and I went to today was entitled “Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis” — it is just wrong that so few students in our metropolis were able to see it… or even had a class where they could have learned about it.

Laporshia Massey died on September 25th after having an asthma attack at school. According to the article in City Paper, it was close to the end of the day, the school called home for advice, and dad told his daughter that they’d deal with it when she got home. She got home, and Dad realized how serious the problem was, and rushed her to the hospital. It wasn’t enough, and Laporshia died later that day.

You aren’t allowed to be surprised by this.

Bryant Elementary doesn’t have a full-time nurse, and the 25th wasn’t one of the days their nurse was staffed at their school. The school called home, a teacher drove her home at the end of the day, so it is not as if the school did nothing. And in case anyone thinks they could have / should have seen this tragedy coming, you should know how hard it is as a lay-person to make the call to call 911.

You aren’t allowed to be surprised by this. But you should be outraged by it.

I read the article and thought about the many times we’ve had kids in crisis, and I have had to make the judgement call to call 911 or not because we don’t have a full-time nurse for our school of 490 kids. In many of the cases where it hasn’t been obvious to call, I did what the school did, I called the parents. I tried to explain to the best of my ability what I was seeing with their child, and then I tried to work with the parents to make an informed decision about what to do. After one of those times, I was reviewing the case the next day my school nurse was in, and ever since then, I’ve included calling her for a consult as part of my procedure, but I didn’t think of that until she told me. But even if part of the procedure was that every principal had a nurse at another school on speed dial, that wouldn’t change how important it is to have a school nurse every day.

I’ve been a coach for many years. I’m CPR and First Aid certified. I’m a parent myself. I have a pretty good head on my shoulders. And yet, I am scared to death that I will make the wrong call one day. At the height of the School District budget, we had a nurse three days a week. With the cuts we have endured over the past several years, we are down to two days a week. We have medically fragile children. We have dozens of kids with asthma. And three days a week, I – with my First Aid and CPR certification and my Masters Degree in English Education – am the person responsible for making the decision if a child needs to go to the Emergency Room.

You aren’t allowed to be surprised by this.

And while the nursing services have gotten worse in the current budget crisis, this is a long-standing problem for Philadelphia District schools for a long time. Our city schools have been under-resourced for years, which makes the current crisis all the more painful.

The arterial road you see in that map is City Line Avenue. It is, quite literally, the city line of Philadelphia. Above Philadelphia is Lower Merion School District. One of its two high schools is Harriton HS. Harriton HS has 1188 kids and four full-time nurses. Science Leadership Academy has 490 kids, and we have a nurse two days a week. This year, the average per pupil expenditure in Philadelphia hovers just under $10,000 per child while Lower Merion is able to spend over $25,000 per child. The way we fund schools in this state is criminal, and it has to change.

You aren’t allowed to be surprised by this.

The way we fund schools in Pennsylvania quite possibly cost Laporshia Massey her life, and yet Governor Corbett is holding up $45 million dollars of state money until he gets the work rule concessions he wants from the teachers’ union. $45 million dollars translates into 400 more professional employees (teachers, counselors and nurses) to work with our kids. When schools have no counselors, when schools don’t have full-time nurses, that is the equivalent of blackmail.

And it has cost at least one young woman – Laporshia Massey – her life. I wonder if Governor Corbett even knows that she died.

You aren’t allowed to be surprised by this. But you better be outraged by it.